davidgillon | Entries tagged with author: mercedes lackey

I'm headed up to see my folks at the end of the month (Easter trip postponed to Whit given a poorly timed bout of Covid on my brother-in-law's part), so went onto LNER's website to book the ticket on Monday night, at which point I was slightly disconcerted to be see:

1) in the left-hand column a confirmation that I'm a wheelchair-using passenger intending to stay in their chair throughout the journey,

and

2) in the right-hand column, almost exactly opposite, a warning that I may have to 'stand' on the connecting services*.

Slight lack of joined-up thinking in the website design there, I feel! **

* The connecting services don't do reservations, and one is a London commuter line, so the warnings aren't unreasonable for actual ambulant passengers, but we wheelchair-users have spaces all of our own.

** It's not the only issue, the time it allows to walk between stations if your journey needs that (St Pancras to Kings Cross in my case) doesn't allow for the extra 5-10 minutes needed to get off the incoming train if you need the ramp and the 20 minutes you're supposed to allow for passenger assistance at your outgoing station. But the standing thing is new.

Recent Reading

What Abigail Did That Summer, Ben Aaronovitch

This is a Rivers of London novella*, but from the point of view of Peter Grant's 13yo cousin Abigail, who makes up the youth wing of the Folly (aka Falcon, aka the Met Police's tame wizards - though Abigail has to pass her Latin GCSE before she gets to learn any spells). It's the summer holidays, and Peter's out of town helping on a missing persons case (and having encounters with homicidal unicorns - see Foxglove Summer), while Abigail's mother has a full-time job looking after her disabled brother, so Abigail is pretty much being left to her own devices. Until, that is, the espionage-obsessed talking foxes seek her out to tell her that something's amiss on Hampstead Heath (a large London park)**. And Abigail quickly figures out that whatever it is has already tried to suck her in, and, separately, her new friend Simon. So it's up to Abigail, Simon, and Indigo the fox to figure out what's going on.

Abigail's a pretty compelling, and convincingly written, character (there are footnotes to explain the slang, framed as for the Folly's tame FBI agent). It's very easy to accept that a streetwise, very intelligent, 13yo, mixed-race Londoner is going to give most police a very wide berth, or the minimum of (false) information necessary to get away, which makes Abigail taking on the problem herself convincing enough. There's only a brief appearance by Nightingale and not a lot of the Rivers here, bar a short audience with Fleet, but the covert female strand of wizardry does show up. Overall it's a strong addition to the series, though I foresee future issues between Nightingale and Simon's mum.

* At 175 pages short novel may be a better description.

** We're actually dropped into the story in media res, but loop back to the start almost immediately.

Werehunter, Mercedes Lackey

I actually pulled this off the shelf while I was winnowing a few books to go to the charity shop, but ended up reading it instead. It's a collection of short stories and I wasn't really taken by the title story, which may be why I didn't remember it favourably. There are a handful of other stories I was a bit meh! about, but another nine I did like, which is a reasonable ratio. Four of those revolve around S'Kitty, a telepathic ship's cat, and her handler as they deal with a bunch of aliens who have a vermin problem. They're not going to win any prizes, but they are enjoyable. The one Valdemar story deals with how Alberich, the Herald's Karsite weaponsmaster, was Chosen. There are two Diana Tregarde stories, one fairly slight encounter that's really, really not kind to the (thinly disguised) Romance Writers of America. I suspect revenge fiction. The other is reasonable, and went on to be the basis for her novel Children of the Night, but some of the language has not aged well. And the last two are a sort of junior Victorian paranormal investigator series with two girls (one an ex-streetkid) and a parrot at a school for the children of those working in the colonies, whose principal is an acknowledged Diana Tregarde expy. Again there are some language aging poorly issues, but they're otherwise sound enough. Their main issue is an egregious outbreak of Dick Van Dyke Cockney.

Hells Bell, Keri Arthur

Book 2 of the Lizzy Grace series and runaway-witch Lizzy and werewolf cop Aiden are fairly desperate to have sex, but ghostly bells summoning Lizzy to find a dead body with its soul ripped from it throw a major spanner in their plans. So Lizzy and her partner/familiar Belle have to step in again given the werewolf reservation's lack of a resident witch to protect its magical wellspring. It possibly plays the "Oh, bugger, we can't have sex, they just found another body" gambit once too often, but otherwise it's an enjoyable outing and the addition of grump witch troubleshooter Ashworth to the cast is a positive step.

Hunter Hunted, Keri Arthur

Book 3, and Lizzy stumbles onto someone conducting blood magic of the worst kind, the kind that leaves a body behind. The witch hierarchy that practically runs Australia call blood-magic using witches heretics, and has an agency to hunt them down, which is just as well as the wellspring decides Lizzie is just the person to turn to when someone starts hunting and skinning werewolves. On the positive side there's just time between the two crimes for Aiden to finally get her into bed. But when the heretic starts hunting the hunters, it turns out Lizzie really isn't going to get away with concentrating on the less dangerous threat.

Another competent episode, and after the previous book's addition of grumpy Ashworth I really liked the addition of his (non-grumpy) husband Eli.

Recent Gaming

I've been playing a fairly ridiculous amount of 7 Days to Die and my adventures in zombie AI wrangling continue. Over the past three horde nights:

Day 77: This week's preparatory changes were stringing a couple of rows of barbed wire down the sides of my base, and fortifying the stairwell up to the ground floor proper/mezzanine should they manage to beat their way into the cellar. Rather than attack me at the (almost) open front door all the zombies still charged up to the sides of my base, into the barbed wire and set about trying to beat their way through the fencing at the side (5000 damage points per block) that keeps them out from under the balcony. I had great fun when I discovered that they would come to stand below wherever I was standing on the balcony, wading through the barbed wide to get there, so I spent horde night running from front to back and vice versa, and taking potshots at the zombies as they tried to keep up with me and the barbed wire slowly whittled them down from below.

Day 84: I doubled up the side fencing to two layers. And this time I got the zombies to the front of the house, where they promptly tried to beat their way through the fencing under the balcony, which was still single layer there. *Headdesk*

On top of that the World War Z style zombie pile-on at that corner was reaching the point that it was threatening to overtop the fence on top of the balcony, even though that's the in-game equivalent of four metres off the ground. So I rushed out to the projecting bastion and started shooting out the bottom of the pile, which was the moment I glitched through the balcony, down onto ground level with the zombies.

I'd hosed off three full magazines from my AK-47 in a panic before I realised they couldn't get to me, that I was still safely inside the double layered fencing under the bastion and they couldn't reach through to me. Which let me finish horde-night in a much more leisurely fashion. On the gripping hand it took me 5 minutes to beat my way out with an axe in the morning.

Day 91: This time I upgraded the fencing to two layers all around the base, and three in places (and put escape hatches in the floor/roof of all of the bastions in case of another glitch). I think that makes a minimum of 15,000 points of damage to beat their way into the base at ground level (and zombies mostly do 10-20 points per hit). And it worked, they finally came for me at the front door.

Gulp.

They still didn't come quite the way I'd expected. They came up a couple of side staircases that need an awkward jump, rather than up the nice simple ramp they were supposed to use (and I'd forgotten to pull up the temporary planking over the pit of barbed wire that was supposed to force them onto awkward balance poles that they will fall off half the time). And for the fifteen minutes of horde night I was firing pretty much continuously trying to keep them back. Of five layers of barricade they'd beaten their way through two and were regularly hurdling the third, simply because I couldn't fire fast enough to kill them to give me time to repair the barricades. At one point they actually got all the way in and almost killed me before I managed to hose them down with the AK-47. I ended the night with 6 rounds of rifle ammunition left out of just shy of 200, and had also used about a hundred each of pistol and shotgun ammunition. Eeep!

First thing I did the next morning was beat down those side staircases, then rejig the front of the base with a completely enclosed corridor with five layers of main barricades and two fall-back ones, all completely enclosed so there'll be much less of this hurdling barricades next time. But I really need better weapons!

Current Location: My Own Private Zombie Apocalypse

Vows and Honor, Mercedes Lackey

I’ve read or re-read pretty much all of Lackey’s Valdemar books over the last year, when I’ve found them in cheap compilations or otherwise on offer on Kindle, the remaining exceptions being the Vanyel and Owl Knight trilogies, and the far distant prequel Griffon Trilogy. Vows and Honor was in that list until I found it when looking for stuff to stuff on my Kindle to read over Christmas.

Vows and Honor collects the Tarma and Kethry stories with which Lackey first broke through into professional publishing, though IIRC the Arrows trilogy were her first novel length works with VandH following later. VandH was originally a duology, but at some point after I first read it she collected the loose stories into an additional volume.

I’m much more critical in my reading nowadays than when I first read these in my late 20s, but some of the things I found slightly offputting might simply be a symptom of fantasy (and societal) expectations in the ‘80s, rather than of Lackey’s developing skill as a writer. So let’s note the overly noble nomads, the cod-medievalisms, occasionally stilted dialogue. and unnecessarily made-up plant etc names here, together with the slightly awkward attempts to be okay with homosexuality* and move on. There’s nothing greatly wrong with VandH or the Arrows trilogy, but her later writing is definitely stronger.

Oathbound

We’re slightly dumped into this in media res, because the story where Tarma and Kethry meet isn’t included here, which given it’s clearly, and somewhat awkwardly, a fix-up is slightly odd. Contractual rights issues?

Anyway, she (T)’s a barbarian-swordswoman-priest, she (K)’s a journeywoman-sorceress with a magic sword, they have adventures and save women. As secondary characters there’s Warrl, a large, intelligent, wolf/lion mix who bonds with Tarma, and Need, Kethry’s sword, inscribed with a mission statement it takes literally: Woman’s Need calls me, as Woman’s Need made me, Her Need must I answer, as my maker bade me; and which weaves in and out of most of the post-Arrows Valdemar stories through the Mage Storms trilogy.

The main problem with Oathbound is that there is no in-novel arc. There is a longer arc, Tarma is the sole survivor of her clan and needs to re-establish it, but to take on blood-feud against the raiders who killed them, she swore an oath to the goddess and is now neuter (Lackey’s term, it’s more than simple celibacy, but there’s no indication of anything physical, it’s more she’s completely psychologically ace). Kethry, on the other hand, explicitly enjoys male company, and has sworn to be the means of re-establishing the clan through her children. They get some good advice early on, from a couple of male mercenaries who sketch out a plan for how to go about getting from here to there – establish a reputation as a pair, join a mercenary company as officers, build a reputation there, use that reputation to found a school of arms and magic, which will give them the stability to raise kids. Oathbound covers the first part of that, but the episodes stand completely independent of each other.

As short stories they’re fine, but this isn’t a novel and can’t really be read as such. There is a fairly formulaic pattern to the episodes, Need summons them to some woman in need and they’re dropped into the problem completely in the dark, even if they range from demon slaying to locked-room mysteries. Some are based on filk songs Lackey had written (included as an appendix), and she injects an annoying bard, Leslac into the story to give them an in-universe existence. Unfortunately I found the whole conceit annoying, not just the bard.

One story (Threes) I had a real problem with. T and K capture a bandit chief they know has been responsible for the rape and murder of several young women (as well as a lot more general murder and banditry), and their punishment is for Kethry to cast an illusion transforming his appearance into that of a beautiful woman, and release him back to his men to be raped in his turn. I’m really not comfortable with rape as a punishment. Having survived that, he reappears in a later story, only to be transformed into a woman by a demon, which seems to be following rape as punishment with enforced sex-change as punishment. Definitely not comfortable with this.

One thing that doesn’t entirely come out in the telling, but is made clear in later canon, is just how young Tarma and Kethry are at the opening of Oathbound. Tarma is eighteen in the first story, Kethry is about the same age. Okay, they’ve both grown up expecting to be independent adults at that age, Tarma as a nomad, Kethry in a school of magic which takes journeywoman literally, but they feel like older, wiser characters right from the start. On the other hand, there is a real feel of them becoming gradually more experienced.

I mostly like the stories, with the noted exceptions, but Oathbound doesn’t work as a novel, so definitely approach it as a themed collection.

Oathbreakers

Time has passed, and Tarma and Kethry are now experienced officers in Idra’s Sunhawks, a mercenary company run by Captain, formerly Princess, Idra. We get an opening mercenary campaign, but then Idra gets summoned home to cast her vote on which of her brothers inherits the crown of Rethwellan, and she doesn’t come back. Tarma and Kethry are sent to investigate, using Tarma’s nomad connections to appear as a pair of horse dealers with a string of horses fit for a king.

Invited into the palace, courtesy of Kethry’s minor title, they find Idra voted for the wrong brother, and King Raschar is running the kind of court in which disagreeing with him is bad for your continued health. They make contact with the head dissident, Jadrek the archivist, but end up running off in search of Idra and/or her brother.

Eventually they find Stefansen, the supposed worthless rake, hiding over the border in Valdemar with his wife and child, and another magic sword (which they just happened to find along the way) confirms him as the rightful king. So it’s time to organise a revolution. By the end of the story they’re in the perfect position to found their magic school.

Despite some overly convenient coincidences, Oathbreakers is a much better novel, starting with it actually being a novel, with a proper arc. It probably also reflects Lackey maturing as a writer and all the caveats I had with Oathbound don’t really apply to Oathbreakers. The one thing I wasn’t entirely comfortable with was the final solution to the Leslac problem – enforced marriage to a slightly dotty duchess.

Oathblood

With Oathblood we’re back to Oathbound territory, short stories about Tarma and Kethry as wandering adventurers. This is all the T and K stories that didn’t go into Oathbound, in some cases because they hadn’t been written at the time, but annoyingly quite a large proportion of the book is two stories that did get into Oathbound, and the claim that was ‘in slightly different format’ doesn’t really hold up AFAICS. There might be some very minor edits, but they might as well have been dropped in without change.

Incidentally, I thought this was new to me, but either I read this in dead tree format, or I managed to come across every story in it as they were published. Probably I have a copy stuffed somewhere I didn’t find when looking for them.

Of the stories not repeated, we get the T and K origin story missing from Oathbound, which is really a story of two halves: really rather good on Tarma’s origins, but then Kethry is conveniently dropped in for the final confrontation, which is much more up and down. The final fight really didn’t work for me. The two duplicate stories obviously occur during the wandering mercenary phase, as do a couple more. The other three are set during the school/refounding the clan phase that we didn’t see in Oathbound/ Oathbreakers. The earliest is set with the clans, and is okay, but for a somewhat awkward attempt to show what seems to be someone who is non-binary. A story set at the school is much better, and makes me wish Lackey had actually written a whole novel set there, while the final story takes Tarma up to Valdemar to do the horse-whisperer thing on a troubled stud farm, and is really too slight to end on. It’s well enough written, but is essentially a gimmick story.

Overall I’m glad I re-read them, but the first and third volumes are more problematical than the middle volume. It might have been better to integrate parts of Oathblood into Oathbound for the Kindle edition and remove the duplications, leaving the three later stories as a coda to the whole.

*I don’t remember the Vanyel trilogy being quite so awkward with homosexuality – and as an ‘80s big-name author trilogy with a gay protagonist it must have been quite a novel (ahem) concept at the time - but it’s a long time since I re-read it. I guess that’s something I’ll have to correct this year.

Current Mood: Mixed
Current Location: Rethwellan and environs

Well, actually about six months worth of reading, since the last of these appears to have been in early December.

I'm not certain what I ended up reading around Christmas, I may have a poke around and see if my Kindle will tell me, but the New Year started on a bit of a tangent. I used to be fairly current on modern naval stuff, partly as a spin-off from the job, partly from personal interest, but that had gradually drifted over into a focus on between-the-wars stuff. Until January, when for some reason I can't recall, possibly just a news report or something else that caught my eye, I took a look, realised how out of date I was, and decided to bring myself back up to speed. Mostly I've been doing it through online stuff, but I've also been buying and reading a lot of stuff for the Harpoon naval wargame rules (written by techno-thriller author Larry Bond), which works to sieve down a lot of information into a condensed form. So that's been one thing, and has probably consumed several hundred hours - realistically that's more than I wanted to spend on it, but I do tend to obsess, and obviously that ate into time where I might have been reading fiction.

Spinning off from that (or possiby vice-versa?) I re-read all of 'The Last War', an ongoing web-based alt-history based on the Berlin Wall not falling and a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict in 2003. I used to read it regularly (it has its own Yahoo group), but hadn't followed it actively in years. It now stands at somewhere over a million words to date, and he's only a couple of weeks into the war.... Very detailed, in the style of Clancy's Red Storm Rising, and wryly amusing for his habit of using TV characters for a lot of roles - so, for instance, you have Dirty Harry Callaghan as head of LAPD running their response to KGB-initiated rioting, and David Woodward's Callan acting as control to a rather nasty assassin. It gets truly bizarre when you have different characters played by the same actor running into each other, as has happened on a couple of occasions.

In fact big re-reading projects pretty much sums up the year to date. Reading Charles Stross's 'The Annihilation Score' led me to re-read the entire set of Laundry Files books up to that point (I'm still behind as 'The Nightmare Stacks' has just dropped down to a price I'm prepared to pay). I thought I'd reviewed the Laundry Files, but I've just checked and apparently not, so I'll leave those for now and come back to them en masse. As a spin-off from reading the actual Laundry books I also bought and read the RPG based on them, plus several of the supplements.

After that I had a bit of a reading hiatus, so deliberately picked up something I knew would be a light read to get myself started again just before Easter. That was the first book in Mercedes Lackey's Collegium series, which is a new timeframe in her Herald books. That turned into seven books in five days, all five of the Collegium series, plus the first two of the three book Herald Spy series. I slowed down a bit for the last of them, then decided I might as well re-read the entire series as the collections were cheap on Amazon. So that's another three trilogies: Arrows of the Queen, The Mage Winds and The Mage Storms (which I thought I hadn't read, but had). Annoyingly I can't find my copy of 'By the Sword', which lies between Arrows and Winds, and is probably my favourite of them all. And annoyingly it doesn't seem to have an ecopy available. I'll probably go on to read the Owl Knight trilogy, and maybe the Griffins prequel trilogy, I'm fairly sure I haven't read either before, but, like the Laundry Files, I'll probably cover all of these in a separate post. I have lots of thoughts, some favourable, some very much not.

And the most recent thing I've re-read is Mary Gentle's 'Grunts', which was an utterly bizzare turn for the author who had just produced the gorgeously gothic 'Architecture of Desire' etc. 'Grunts' is the story of what happens when great orc Ashnak of the fighting Agaku, plus a few of his nestmates and a couple of amoral halflings, are sent to rob a dragon's horde of weapons during the run up to the final battle between Good and Evil. It turns out the dragon was a militaria collector, and his entire horde is weapons the like of which the orcs have never seen, an entire hollowed-out mountain stuffed full of AK-47s and M-16s (not to mention tanks and gunships and worse). The dragon's dying curse is that the thieves will become what they steal, and the stuff they steal includes a complete set of US Marine Corps manuals. In just a few pages the Orc Marines have staged a fighting retreat from the plains of faux-mageddon and are figuring out what to do with themselves. If they can just stop magicians spelling their weapons into not working then they have a weapon against which magic has no defences (yes, that's a bit chicken and egg). They're orcs, they don't mind being cannon-fodder, but they much prefer being cannon fodder that wins (and they've had more than enough working for Dark Lords). That sends Ashnak and a few of his best orcs off on a quest to get the required talismans, which brings them back into contact with the two halflings, and their mother; which sets up unending emnity between Ashnak and the sons, and a rather more complex relationship with their mother. And then a whole lot more stuff happens: war crimes, election campaigns, alien invasions, and war crimes trials, and if no one actually says 'peace through fire superiority' then it's a concept the Orc Marines would understand perfectly (well, apart from the peace bit).

I remember thinking 'Grunts' was wonderful when it first appeared, but re-reading it a quarter of a century on I can see its flaws (and realistically I suspect I've changed a lot in the past 25 years). Some of the humour now makes me wince. Yes, they're Orcs and “naterally wicious,” (to borrow a line from Dickens), but beyond the pratfalls and the humourous fraggings those really are war crimes (and rape humour) we're being asked to laugh at. And more fundamentally, there's something a little incoherent about the narrative. It's basically Ashnak shooting his way to running the planet, and it is reasonable that we get the final battle between Good and Evil out of the way quickly, as it's a story about winning the peace, but the major portion of the book seems to be more 'and then this happened' than any clearly plotted progression. There's some nicely handled character progression - an elf who turns into a perfect Orc marine while stuck in an Aliens scenario, for instance - but there's also what looks like it should be a major character arc around an actual US Marine, only for it to be over in four randomly scattered scenes.

I still like it, and it was innovative when it was written, but it hasn't aged as well as it might and if things still make me smile, then it's more often a guilty smile than I'm comfortable with.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Belatedly ex libris